Game Review - The Darjeeling Limited

As gaming technology progresses ever closer to full immersion, with HD graphics and motion recognition tech like Microsoft's Project Natal pushing the boundaries of what games can represent, we have seen an explosion in abstract gaming genres, more concerned with telling convoluted and compelling narratives than merely giving the player an avatar to guide through a series of environments. This attempt to match established storytelling media such as books and films might be misguided. Arguably, games can do certain things that other media cannot, so why not continue to do those things instead of trying to imitate old media like movies? However, this has not dissuaded games developers, and the latest release from game developer Wes Anderson, in association with Tweesoft Games, is a notable progression in this abstract-narrative sub-genre.


The Darjeeling Limited is Anderson's first project since the critical failure of his first-person shooter / marine exploration simulator The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. After sales failed to materialise, Anderson split from long-time collaborators RagnarokRain, a move that shocked the gaming community. The success of their previous games -- Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums -- cemented their reputation as purveyors of eccentric gaming experiences, with Anderson's fertile mind served by RagnarokRain's incredible coding prowess.

Nevertheless, it was risky to change their style from increasingly complex Sims-style strategy game -- with Rushmore allowing you to manage Max Fischer's career at school, and The Royal Tenenbaums expanding your responsibilities to controlling a large family in a New York brownstone -- to a peculiar cross-breed of other genres. Regrettably their gamble failed terribly. The character of Steve Zissou was promoted as being the next Master Chief or Gordon Freeman but, with the traditional macho couture of the first person hero abandoned in favour of a wetsuit and red bobble hat, Zissou failed to convince. To make things worse, the underwater sections were poorly designed and overlong, until eventually fatigue set in for most players, ditching the game before completing the fabled Jaguar Shark Forgiveness achievement. Not long after the game was released, it was Anderson who ditched RagnarokRain.

Following the acrimonious split, RagnarokRain's head project developer Colt Wendell moved on to collaborating with French game desginer Jean-Luc Godard on the heavily guarded project Weekend. Godard has confounded expectation in the past, which is a reassuring thought to hold onto after initial rumour hinted that it was merely some form of 2-D side-scrolling driving game. Anderson, meanwhile, teamed up with Tweesoft Games, in a move that surprised all of us. Tweesoft's projects to date have been the amusing on-rails shooter Snakes on a Plane, which featured infamous voicework from Samuel L. Jackson, and the diverting Singstar-esque Hustle and Flow. Though those games sold well, neither hinted that Tweesoft was a good match for the ground-breaking intellectualism of Anderson.

Thankfully, for the most part, The Darjeeling Limited is a return to form for Anderson, and a notable leap for Tweesoft after the choppiness of their previous projects. The player takes control of three self-obsessed brothers -- Francis, Peter and Jack Whitman -- as they search India for their estranged mother in order to connect with her following the death of their father. The majority of the game takes place on the train of the title, switching from first-person to third-person and back again, as you interact with a selection of beautifully written NPCs, with occasional excursions off the train providing some much needed variety. These adventures usually end with a mad dash, either on foot or by taxi, with a countdown clicking off the time until the train departs. Though most of the game is leisurely, these sections definitely get the pulse racing. (Click on screen grabs for greater detail.)


As you progress through the game, your primary goal is to monitor two variables: Frustration With Brothers and Obliviousness To Others, both measured as percentages. The first measurement must be kept as low as possible, a task hindered by the insufferable selfishness of all of the main characters. As you hop from brother to brother, you see terrible behaviour from each of them, bringing that frustration level to the boil several times. Only by acquiescing to their neediness will your frustration level drop, but this will stop you from progressing through the game, meaning you have to balance your frustration, and your efforts to bring your siblings closer, with the need to get to your mother's abbey to reconcile with her. If you fail to keep your frustration tempered, and the percentage counter goes past 90%, the game momentarily changes to a first-person shooter mode, with your currently controlled character attempting to incapacitate the other two brothers using pepper spray.


The second measurement, Obliviousness To Others, has to remain high. Any other gaming designer would require you to keep that level low, but this appears to be Anderson's satirical take on the selfish and clueless behaviour of American tourists around the world. The higher this level, the greater the chance you will be thrown off the train, which allows you to progress deeper into the game. This counterintuitive choice is one of the many delightful Andersonian details that have made him such a star of the gaming world, and belongs with other memorable game moments as the failure of Max Fischer to win the heart of his teacher in Rushmore, or the death of the father figure triggering the reconciliation of his family in the final level of The Royal Tenenbaums.


Once off the train, the rules change, and you are required to keep the Obliviousness meter as low as possible, which triggers the River Rescue level. Again, Anderson plays tricks with the player by making the level impossible. Controlling Peter Whitman, you attempt to save a boy from a raging river, sadly to no avail. No matter how many times we restarted the level, the outcome was always the same. Though the consequence of this failure is continuation to the Funeral In Two Timezones level, it might frustrate many players expecting some kind of heroic catharsis, and could lead to the same kind of protests that followed the unavoidable death of Ned Plimpton in the helicopter level of The Life Aquatic.

Hopefully gamers will see past this and continue onwards, as the final levels of the game feature a race against time to reach the sanctuary of the Abbey, all the while chased by a man-eating tiger. This antagonist is as relentless as Nemesis from the third Resident Evil game, and can only be distracted with the use of pepper spray, cobras, and bottles of perfume. After this exhausting series of challenges, the brothers finally reach the Abbey, where they attempt to reconcile with the mother, who has absolutely no interest in making nice and instead just vanishes. Again, this could alienate the gamer as much as the lack of Jaguar-Shark-killing action in The Life Aquatic, especially as the game doesn't finish there, and doesn't give you any hint of what to do next. At least an hour was wasted walking the characters through the halls of the Abbey, with the same five phrases being spouted by the other brothers over and over again (we never want to hear the line about Peter stealing a belt again), before we realised that we had to leave the Abbey to head back to the nearby train station. A comment on the lack of tidy resolution in real life? Or crappy quality control by the game-testers? Who can say?

Throughout The Darjeeling Limited are littered a number of mini-games, each one specific to a certain character:

Jack:

• I Want That Stewardess: Can Jack seduce Rita while avoiding her angry boyfriend?
• Hotel Chevalier: Here comes Jack's ex-girlfriend. Can you activate your iPod in time for her arrival?

Francis:

• The Search For Brendan: Find your assistant and get him to laminate all of your itineraries before he gets sick of your nonsense.
• Dinner Time: Can you order dinner for each of your brothers before they get a chance to interject?
• Those Are $3000 Loafers!: Chase the young urchin through the streets to get your shoe back.

Peter:

• Is This Meant To Be Sad?: Finish reading Jack's short story without anyone seeing you cry
• We Think A Snake Might Have Gotten Onboard!: Hunt the cobra.
• Are These Dad's Keys?: Find all of your father's belongings, which are littered throughout the train and the Indian countryside. Hint: The final suitcase is hidden in the Funeral In Two Timezones level.

While these distractions are enjoyable, they tend to get in the way of the central narrative, diluting the effect of all of the rug-pulling mentioned earlier. It's hard to become completely affected by the emotional rollercoaster of the Whitmans' reconciliation when you're interrupted constantly by crude racing simmulators. Another annoyance is the poor choice of unlockables, which are mostly songs by The Kinks. For some reason Anderson seems to think that gamers are only playing his games in order to access songs by British bands from the 60s, and has added Kinks unlockables to all of his games. Time to move on from that particular peccadillo, especially as there are very few unused Kinks songs left.


These are small quibbles. Technically the game is a marvel, with excellent motion capture of the main actors throughout. India is atmospherically rendered, especially during the final scenes as the characters beccome more in tune with their surroundings, meaning the avatars become smaller and smaller in the frame. Narratively, the game is unusually complex, easily surpassing the inexplicably lauded driving game Little Miss Sunshine and its gimmicky colour-blind level. After a disappointment, Anderson is back, and Tweesoft have established themselves as a force to be reckoned with. We look forward to their forthcoming collaboration with Alexander Payne on the wine-themed platformer Sideways.

Lost - Jughead

::Disclaimer: my usual efforts to post something about an episode of Lost before the transmission of the next fell apart a bit this week thanks to computer meltdowns (not our computer for once), weather troubles, and other distracting gubbins, so this post about Jughead (episode 5:03) is going out a day after the US broadcast of The Little Prince. I'm well aware that some of this may be already rendered moot, but for the benefit of UK readers, I'm posting it anyway.::

Why did I doubt my beloved Lost? What was I thinking? Was it a brain parasite from the planet Lifehate IV? Is my consciousness travelling through time in a Billy-Pilgrim stylee? It's ironic considering how often I bang on about how the show relies on faith not just thematically but as fuel. Without the fans sticking by it and accepting all sorts of weirdness and peculiarity, it would cease to exist. I'll ponder that while I eat this humble pie.


Why did I like this so much more than the previous episodes? Mainly it was because we didn't get to see the Oceanic Six, whose convenient decision to convene in Los Angeles just in time to help Ben get them together is, at the moment, kinda dull and a little contrived. I say at the moment because for all we know there are forces coralling them together, though that's speculative, and more than a little desperate on my part. (So soon I forget. Gotta have faith!)

Instead of Sweaty Jack and Crazy Hurley, we got some top Desmond action, a few revelations about Faraday, who is increasingly looking like quite a bad man, and the introduction of a new dramatic element on the island that worries me greatly. I'll get to that later. In the meantime, an observation; how obnoxious are the Hostiles?


New character Ellie, seen above sucking an invisible time-travelling lemon while holding onto a WWII rifle, is a horrible brat, instantly achieving Gupta status by way of scrunching up her face, harassing everyone, and talking with a wheedling nasal drone. Ugh. Having her follow Faraday around irked the crap out of us, and only the very strong suspicion that she is Miss Hawking (whose first name is Eloise) and also possibly Faraday's mom, keeps us from writing her off altogether. Still, at the end of the episode the Island Six quantum leap to a new time, so it's possible we're done with her for now.


Still, she was merely a bit crap and aggressive. That's nothing compared to the guy who momentarily went by the name Jones. His sour-face, murderous streak, arrogance and ignorance made Ellie's flaws pale into insignificance. Of course, this memorably nasty piece of work just had to be someone more significant than Random Horrible Other #4. The reveal that this was a very young Charles Widmore was easily the highlight of the episode, and of the season so far.


Of course it was inevitable that we would eventually find out some back story about Widmore, and it's one of the best new features of this season's time-hopping structure is that we get to see moments from the island's past with those revelations we crave held back not through handy interruptions or statements like, "I cannot tell you that at this time," but by the narrative device set up in the season opener. It makes a nice change to have our expectations confounded in this way. Last night we saw Doubt, which was okay and annoying in relatively equal measure, but exasperated us by having moments of revelation constantly interrupted by incessant phonecalls and knocked doors. Maybe on stage that shit gets a free pass (along with the desperately obvious metaphors like closing windows and lightbulbs popping), but onscreen it looks silly.

Jughead's other revelations were dubious, not counting the wonderful reveal that Penny and Desmond's son was called Charlie, a moment that I'm sure made any Lost fan worth their salt choke up a bit. Besides that wonderful moment, we learned that Faraday was in love with Charlotte. Or was he? Proclaiming his love for her seemed sweet enough, but was it the truth? Was it merely a way to convince Alpert to let him access the bomb? Or, more likely, was it misplaced guilt over the condition of Teresa Spencer, the woman whose brain he wrecked through his time experiments?


After all, Teresa looked awfully like Charlotte. This is something we'll undoubtedly find out about in time, though considering her terrible condition at the end of the episode, and Faraday's distraught reaction, maybe this is definitive?


Of course, all of this might be unimportant, as this love story might just be a way to put Faraday on a path towards infiltrating the Orchid station in order to get his hands on that exotic matter behind the cave wall, as we saw in the season opener. His desire to save her, either because of love or guilt, is going to drive him to seriously mess with time. The other consquence is that we care deeply about Charlotte, who has been thinly sketched thus far. Now that she is shown being in love with someone the audience seems to like, we want her to survive and see her love reciprocated. Okay, I'm assuming a lot about the audience, but I know my initial apathy towards her has evaporated. Her barely suppressed glee at the possibility of Faraday sharing her feelings was her finest moment yet, and turned my opinion around 180 degrees.


It doesn't look good for her, though. At the end of the episode we see her haemorrhaging just like the previous timelost corpses, somehow having an adverse effect to the quantum leaping that the rest of the Island Six aren't.


Though that's distressing, it was a nice bookmark to the opening of the episode, with Desmond panicking about Penny's bloodloss during childbirth. (Extra awesome points for reversing their positions and their emotional states; Faraday's terror and Desmond's joy.)


That's not the only connection. Desmond also gets to endure an uncomfortable moment upon meeting Teresa Spencer's sister, who criticises Faraday for leaving her with a comment about the sort of man who would abandon a woman, reminding us of Desmond's abandonment of Penny years before.


Perhaps it's that shaming that propels Desmond towards his nemesis (and Faraday's benefactor), Charles "Necksnapper" Widmore. Considering how scared of him Desmond is, he definitely needs an extra push to get it over with. His showdown was perfectly played, with Widmore in a state of panic over the fate of his daughter, knowing that Ben has vowed to kill her. Of course, telling Desmond that would have been helpful, especially now that Desmond is delivering his beloved to Ben, with Penny's oblivious, yet fearful consent.


All of this excitement, and none of it revolving around characters introduced in the first season. It's a daring decision, sidelining the most familiar characters to concentrate instead on some n00bs. Of course, Faraday, Penny, Desmond and Miles are the most popular characters introduced late in the day (not counting the ever-awesome Ben), but even so, it's a testament to the sprawling cast of characters that the show can make a choice like that and not only avoid censure by the fans but deliver an episode so highly praised.


We still managed to get some quality time with Locke, who got to give Alpert the compass he received from him in the future. Nice that the show has delivered that moment so soon, thanks to the show's truncated length. Of course, now we have the paradox of where the compass comes from. Where is the moment where it comes into either of their possession in the first place? Alpert gives it to Locke, but only because he receives it from Locke in the past. That means the compass is either a spontaneous generation of the universe trapped in a time loop, or it comes from before the initial looping and was just made somewhere and fell into the hands of... Well, someone. Even if the latter is the case, the show has been so careful with the tricks and traps of temporal displacement that we are viewing a fictional universe that won't allow for the loop to ever have a beginning, as shown by the actions and fates of our heroes being decided by the ramifications of events that have yet to happen, like a closed system.


In Alan Moore's Watchmen, the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan describes time as a crystal, with every event happening at the same time. Mortals see time as a line, but he knows everything that has happened and will happen. If everything has already happened, everything would always have happened. The big bang didn't just create an expanding universe in three spatial dimensions (or 10-D, or 26-D, depending on which theory you subscribe to), it also created an entire universe in the temporal dimension. We didn't get one run-through before it was set in stone, which would allow for a compass to be created and then fall into a time-loop. Everything happened at once, meaning the compass has no point of origin. It just is.


Consciousness is the thing that travels in a straight line through time, giving the illusion of the future is not set. When it goes right, that is. Poor Teresa Spencer's consciousness, which is skipping about (though curiously not creating the horrible death we saw in The Constant) is hopping from point to point within that crystalline structure. Nevertheless, her body is not moving, just the ephemeral mind. As we've seen in Lost, until the islanders became unmoored in time, matter was not travelling through time, only consciousness. As the universe cannot handle a paradox whereby the chain of causality is changed, matter cannot be displaced or diverted or moved from one place in time. That's why Desmond is able to take a trip back in time from future brain to past brain, but is stopped from changing time by Miss Hawking's intervention (see previous discussions of Time Agents).


However, we're now seeing matter, that is the Island Six, moving around time on the island, with the past caused by the future and vice versa, with people like Alpert learning things about the future and then doing things that affect the future. The island is outside time itself, operating by its own rules and including these paradoxes. There's always been talk of the island being inside a tesseract of some kind, and this theory suggests that is indeed the case. Or, you know, I'm totally wrong about this and am letting my own beliefs about the shape of time complicate my theorising. Ignore me, I'm just babbling by now.

It's great to have the show introducing elements that get me theorising again, even though it's possible I'm chasing my tail here and we will eventually see the compass arrive on the island somehow, but despite my rise in enthusiasm caused by mad revelations and some nifty moments with Faraday and Sawyer, it wasn't all great. In particular, I'm super-miffed at the introduction of a nuclear bomb onto the island. I know I'm not the first person to point out the rule of Chekhov's Gun, but it does suggest that now, at a very late stage in the show, we're seeing the object that will bring about the resolution of the story.


At least, I assume it will. I have a feeling, if my Sirens of Titan theory is anywhere near correct, we will find that our heroes have had the course of their lives altered so as to channel them toward the fateful flight of Oceanic 815, where they play a part in maintaining the flow of time on the island by doing the things they have done during the run of the show. As has been seen, they had a dreadful life, not one of them happy. Without the interference of the island, perhaps they would have had a much happier existence. The finale could show the island being destroyed by the bomb, an action that somehow reverberates through time, erasing the influence of the island upon everyone attached to it. Once freed of the obligation to protect the island, the Oceanic passengers live happy lives, their personalities and psyches no longer distorted by the influence of the island and its time agents which, funnily enough, means that in a way the island really was Hell, as very early theories posited.

Either that or the show will get rid of it well before then. The show has a history of introducing some game-changing element early in a season (Swan station, New Otherton, the Kahuna), and then getting rid of it or rendering it defunct by the time the finale rolls around. It could be that we lose the time-travelling at the end of season five, though I suspect that will go fairly soon, either because of the return of the Oceanic Six or due to Faraday's inevitable intervention. Still, I hope the bomb will be used soon. As I dread the thought of being proved right more than making a fool of myself, I hope it does. So far the introduction of the bomb has made me uneasy about the future of the show, providing such a conventional way to resolve the story, though it did amuse me when Faraday tells Ellie to bury the bomband not worry about it as it hasn't exploded fifty years hence. Time-travel humour!


Right, this pointless post needs to be finished so I can get on with watching The Little Prince. Before I do that, the usual random guff. Here is Desmond in a cunning disguise at "Oxford University library", which, I'm surprised to see, is a bit smaller than I had imagined. The glasses are a nice touch, but his lovely hair is a much bigger give-away than his eyes.

Please can we give Miles more to do? He's got a flashback coming up soon, right? His snarkiness is great, but I want something more meaty ASAP. I say this with no knowledge of what happens in The Little Prince. He's probably doing all sorts of funky stuff and I'll seem like a fool. Just bear with me! I had trouble finishing this on time because of a weird urge to watch the debacle called Max Payne really very important reasons.


This is some of the best greenscreen work on the show so far. It took us a little while to adjust to the fact that it's an effect, because that is very definitely a British street. It was almost as discombobulating as the bit in Guy Ritchie's Snatch when you see Dennis Farina walking down a typical suburban street.


Sawyer didn't get much to do this week, though he did get a great "Son. Of. A. Bitch!" moment late in the episode. Are the writers including that phrase for the benefit of some drinking game? It's every episode now. I'm not complaining. He's up there with Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon films for great "son-of-a-bitch" enunciation.


Remember I went on about how gorgeous this show is? I love that there is a constant reminder of that throughout. No wonder people are fighting for the island.


Seriously, I really hated Ellie. I'll file her alongside Harper Stanhope and Ana-Lucia in the Female Characters Who Make Me Growl Into A Cushion Like The Anger Management People Told Me column.


Richard Alpert appears here as some kind of dark angel, with the tent acting as his wings. Yet again, we think of a character as having some kind of intrinsic good (he was eager to help Locke in the past, after all), but is this another visual clue that we should be wary of him too?


Upon entering this tent to chat to Faraday, Alpert says, "I hope I'm not interrupting anything," in a snarky way. I wonder if he taught Ben everything he know about being kinda douchey from time to time.


This guy, who hassles Desmond while rummaging about in his old lab (yay for rat maze and pink laser cameos)...


...is a dead ringer for Eric Powell's The Goon.


I was very surprised that Faraday knew all about Miles’ psychic abilities, but no one else I’ve spoken to seems to think that’s a big deal. Considering the physicist has taken it into his stride that he’s hanging around with a medium, you’d think it was significant considering how many scientific laws have just been broken.


I love that Lostpedia considered this explosive moment an example of the black/white visual theme that runs through the show. It suggests it was done on purpose, but was it a lucky accident? Did episode director Rob Holcomb get a call from Lindelof and Cuse asking for some black and white in the shot? It strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Still, those Losties got blowed the fuck up. Sweet.


They are getting together, right? Look at them! Now that's what I call "Exotic matter". Rowr rowr!


Further strengthening of the theory that Ellie is Faraday's mom; her first sight of him is made more dramatic by being down a rifle. The irony is that the man she is tempted to shoot is in fact her child and she doesn't yet know it. Or the director was showing off. Or there haven't been any game references for a while and so they stuck a nod to Medal of Honour in there (of course M1 Garand rifles are used throughout that game, and Lost soundtrack composer Michael Giacchino does the music for them, so it makes sense).


OMG the Thames! Except you can't really just sail your boat up it and just dock it outside the Aquarium. And the Thames? Has never been that blue. Unless there was once a dye spillage incident I've not heard of.


Nothing else to say about this, really, other than that it's great that the episode restored me to my usual boggle-eyed gleeful self after that silliness the week before. And now I shall watch The Little Prince and keep the dream alive. Right, US readers? It's good, right? ::partially suppresses panic::

ETA: Okay, I've seen The Little Prince. I was silly to worry, wasn't I. UK readers who are going to see it on Sunday, prepare for XXXtreme awesomeness.

BBC Breakfast Watch! World Of Warcraft Will Kill You Stone Dead

I've not watched BBC Breakfast for a while, replacing the misery of watching Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams (aka Mail-tuttery-personified) with the endurance test that is Atlas Shrugged. Well, I say that, but I will admit to taking a break from that as well, so that I could binge on Ed Brubaker's genius run on Captain America (surely the classic Cap run) and Ultimate Spider-Man by Bendis (on top form, thankfully) and Stuart Immonen. I know! I should end that frigging book, but I needed to see the new Captain America kick some right-wingers around, especially now that they're feeling so down. Obama's got a mandate, bitches! A mandate! Suck it up!

Anyway, this morning I paid more attention to BBC Breakfast than is healthy, primarily because today some evil corporate bastards have unleashed a new weapon against humanity, striking against our precious children by chaining them to an artificial reality in order to drain them of their resources, their souls, their potential. Such an apocalyptic event deserved full expression of their dismay, as they tried valiantly to prevent the theft of an entire generation. Yes, though it sickens me to say it, Blizzard released another WoW expansion pack. Those evil mind-controlling motherfuckers! Save the children from that thing we don't quite understand but will distrust anyway just to be on the safe side!


As soon as I saw the two disapproving parent-archetypes sitting on their sofa with all of the moral authority of two angry bags of compost, announcing the imminent discussion with all of the severity their little brains could muster, my heart sank. As I have said before when railing against this most insultingly alarmist show, I understand that early morning TV is meant to be light, but surely the release of an MMORPG expansion pack for one of the most successful, popular, and beloved games in the world is not going to bring about the death of childhood, and so acting like it is is surely the antithesis of "light chatter". I missed the start of the show, but Canyon informed me that even before their little snippy piece about the game began, they predictably brought up the death of a South Korean gamer from exhaustion which, in traditional BBC Breakfast style, was linked to World of Warcraft when, in fact, the guy died playing Starcraft. A small point, but indicative of the rigour with which the disapproving Luddites had researched the piece.

I almost didn't watch. It's been a while since I spent time watching Bill and Sian, simply because they make me so mad I can barely stand it. For all I know they have been railing against gaming with miserable regularity. "The release of a game called The Force Unleashed has raised concerns that children may turn to the Dark Side after playing it." "This game, Spore, encourages children to cultivate and eat diseases!" "Your children are at threat from LittleBigPlanet, which might make your children sew themselves into sacks!" Of course, this morning they were particularly terrible, using their stern faces to register disgust over the thought of anyone daring to play computer games which corrupt minds and destroy lives and many other imaginary things.

Though they've done this before, and even though they were talking (down) to three WoW fans instead of having some typically ineffectual and token balanced debate (which is usually conducted with the inclusion of some non-gaming crazy person with a head full of suspicion and fear), their behaviour this morning was even more snotty and dismissive as usual, probably because they resented wasting their time discussing something as "silly" as a game when OMG! They had the thrill of introducing a previously filmed clip of a BBC journo on a press junket interviewing Angelina Jolie about Changeling! The glamour of presenting BBC Breakfast should never be sullied with something as decadent and corrupting as a mere game. Get off our sofa, worthless fools, I could imagine Sian saying, as Bill sits and devours numerous custard creams while humming the theme to Dixon of Dock Green.


I felt especially bad for one player, Marijke Jensen, who was still clad in the Night Elf costume she had been wearing to the special release event at HMV Oxford Circus last night. It was a cool costume, and after Bill had expressed a somewhat unhealthy interest in it, she seemed to not expect his sneering "Whyyyyyyyyyyy?" because, you know, you don't think a TV presenter would be openly rude and dismissive like that, though she was friendly enough to defuse the moment with a genial acknowledgement that wearing something like that might seem extreme to, say, a trad-dad square from the McCarthy era magically transported to W1, 2008. The other guests, a hardcore player (Ben West) who had also attended the launch, and Tim Edwards from PC Gamer Magazine, then had to put up with Bill and Sian stumbling to understand what the game involves, not to mention returning to the same goddamn question, over and over again, about how long people play it. The poor guy who attended the launch, who had waited 36 hours in line, was mocked by Bill for waiting so long, but at least he tried to explain that he did it for the feeling of being a part of something, a community of like-minded people, that playing the game is a social thing and leads to real friendships (as regular Shades of Caruso visitor Jaredan can attest to). It's something Bill can't understand, as the only community he belongs to is Daily Mail Island, and they despise the BBC. It must be horribly depressing for him.

The piece continued for only a few minutes, but it felt like a million years, with both presenters tut-tutting at the amount of time devoted players spent on the game, and then reading out one viewer email from a Concerned Mother who complained at her 18-year old son's daily WoW marathons (12 hours a day, which seems excessive and probably exaggerated for effect), stating that he has no friends. Of course, anyone who plays the game will know that it's very easy to make friends online, and the game depends on social interaction and cooperation, but parents (and Bill and Sian, obviously) won't accept that because internet friends can't possibly exist or mean anything to their children, oblivious to the fact that they are probably grateful to meet people with the same hobby as them, who don't judge them for doing something they enjoy. After that single negative email Sian deigned to read a positive one, prefaced with the dismissive and frustrated bleat, "I have to say, the majority have been positive because they do play the game," which is the perfect example of how her mind remains closed against new information. Closed, because otherwise all of the Hypothetical Idiots she has invented will come spilling out, babbling hysterically, running into traffic, or eating quicklime, or maybe even playing a computer game for eight days without a break and then dying from dehydration.


As I said earlier, this anti-gaming suspicion is something I've gone on about before, and it's a really silly thing to get annoyed about, but the Today Programme is also getting in on the technophobia with a depressingly one-sided report, and the BBC News homepage features this special report, which makes me suspect the corporation is secretly really pissed at the failure of Fightbox. (Night Elf Marijke is on the far left on the homepage picture.)

Still, despite the depressing blanket suspicion across the BBC's coverage, I'm most incensed by Bill and Sian's obnoxious behaviour, telling their guests off for playing WoW for any amount of time (Bill kept tutting, "That's still a lot" no matter what the response), frowning constantly and belittling them for having an interest in something they don't understand. With the only "professional" interviewed being a young journalist, they felt free to treat their guests like ill-behaved delinquents, sniping at them and their hobby with distasteful arrogance. Even Bill's "jokes" about the Night Elf's ears were framed as a nasty side-effect of playing too long.

Obviously there is an issue about compulsive playing there; I'd be crazy to deny it (probably driven crazy by obsessive gaming!). However, any pursuit can potentially create obsessive behaviour in those who follow it, and many of the complaints about WoW are coming from parents whose children, who have retreated into what they see as a pointless fantasy world, would probably retreat into some other world away from their parents if they weren't gaming. It's called adolescence, and is a fact of life. Nevertheless, that coverage is not what annoys me. It's the distrustful attitude of much of the mainstream media, possibly resentful that young eyeballs are being stolen by gaming (or whatever the dehumanising term for viewing figure decline is this week), that gaming is always framed in terms of the harm it must do to children, that it is never seen as a positive thing or a potential source of much artistic value, that the fact that it brings people together is treated with much amusement by commentators stuck in their 20th Century world and unable to believe that social networking via any new form of technology can be enormously empowering and, at its most base level, a lot of fun. Families are being formed or brought together because of these developments. It's not threatening our way of life, it's enhancing it. Embrace our machine friends!

Most immediately, though, I'm furious about the rude attitude of Bill and Sian, who acted like stern parents to these total strangers, all of whom are over the age of 18 and surely deserving of some respect. It was bordering on bullying behaviour, to be honest, and I'm sick of seeing gamers treated like potentially unstable children. Even worse, I feel especially bad for gamers who have been up all night, filled with excitement about the release of a long-awaited expansion pack and happy to have been part of a joyful event populated by people who share the same interests as them, turning up to a BBC studio to enthuse about their hobby only to be treated like delusional freaks or criminals by the sub-moronic presenters of this appalling, amateurish, poorly researched piece of shit show.


Compare Bill and Sian's awful treatment of the three gamers with their fawning interview of singer and sentient oil slick Jonathan Ansell, whose oleaginous insincerity was only matched by their boundless delight at his dreary anecdotes about how wonderful he is. A truly nauseating display. If I could I'd organise a boycott of the show by bombarding gamer and legendary literary leviathan Charlie Brooker with incensed all-caps emails, but that's just the fatigue-induced temporary insanity talking, and has nothing to do with my recent Civilisation Revolution binges, which have lasted for up to five hours. Nothing to do with that at all.

Still, it was not all misery. They also had Dragon's Den judge Duncan Bannatyne on. I've yet to express my immense frustration at these pompous, self-aggrandising sinkholes who have convinced the BBC, a publicly funded corporation, to air a show that allows them to interview inventors and cherry-pick the best ideas for investment, from which they then make a fat wad of cash. Truly imaginative entrepreneurial thinking, there. Of course, I take great pleasure every time I hear that one of their rejects, usually dismissed with derision and laughter, has become a huge success without their minimal investment (usually offered in exchange for almost punitive shares in the new businesses). If I came up with a solid idea, the last thing I would do is give these crooks a chance to absorb my profits with their rapacious plundering.


Anyway, Bannatyne was on, and looking grumpier than usual. I wonder why? (There was a copy of the Sun sitting around the studio earlier in the show, during the sports news, and I can imagine it was whisked away and hidden with a quickness once they were done with it. Poor Duncan.)

ETA: Good to see I'm not the only one annoyed by Sian and Bill's arrogant embrace of technological ignorance, and worded with far more elegance than I can muster to boot.

How We Waited Out The Election

Only now, as the smoke clears and the euphoria dies down, do I realise how much the wait for November the fourth had turned my mind into a stagnant pond, a Moebius strip of re-thought thoughts, cognition turned into a chore thanks to the insane worry over something I literally had no control over (at least Canyon could vote, an act that made her justifiably happy). Two days later, and look at me! I'm all florid and shit, like what I was previous, like.

During that interminable wait, we tried to keep ourselves occupied and not just keep reading the same four websites (though we enjoyed it all) and getting even more obsessed than usual with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Our efforts bore some pleasant fruit (the cherries and strawberries of the week) and some disappointing fruit too (mangoes, sharon fruit and unripe bananas, metaphorically speaking).

Burn After Reading

I had high hopes for this after the excellence of No Country For Old Men had erased disappointed memories of the previous four Coen Brothers movies (yes, I'm not crazy about O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Man Who Wasn't There), but it was frustratingly slight. Being more of a fan of their hyper-weird comedies than their dramas, with The Big Lebowski at the top of my faves list and Raising Arizona close on its tail, I was hoping this would be similarly unhinged and frenetic, but instead it was like Fargo with more jokes, which is a problem considering I don't really like Fargo that much. At least, not as much as many seem to.


Of course, mid-level Coen Brothers movies still have a lot to recommend. Almost all of the performances were great (though weirdly Malkovich did my head in with. His. Stilted. Fucking. Line. Readings. And. Laboured. Fucking. Profanity.), with special kudos to the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins (who broke my heart). That said, why did they bother casting Tilda "Goddess" Swinton for a part that had about twelve lines? Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to see her on screen in any capacity, but she seemed ill-served. Here's hoping she becomes a Coen repertory player and turns up again, except with something to do other than be annoyed with the men in her life.


Even with that cast, the film never seemed to come alive, though the central point, that of lampooning the arrogance and solipsism of a bunch of self-regarding twerps who think their pitiful lives have some greater meaning, when in fact all they are little more than a bunch of horny morons, was beautifully done, perhaps even more so than the previous times they have tried to make that point (No Country, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.). I've had more fun thinking about the film than I did watching it. That said, Brad Pitt is a better comedic actor than I thought possible.


I'm grateful to the Coens for proving that.

Quantum of Solace

Casino Royale is possibly my favourite Bond movie since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, leapfrogging over The Living Daylights, The Spy Who Loved Me and Goldeneye, but poverty has delayed us going to see the latest movie. Instead I've been rewatching this over and over again.



We might still see it this week, once I've sold a kidney, following the wonderful news that Vue Cinemas have instituted over-18's only performances for people who don't want to put up with hordes of little shits treating cinemas like the local bus depot. A black man is elected President of the United States and a cinema chain (in our home town, no less) finally realises moviegoers have been staying away because of the behaviour of a bunch of oiks, all in the same week? This truly is the golden age of civilisation. Speaking of which...

Civilisation Revolution


If anything stops me blogging, it will be this game. In its previous manifestations it was already the greatest game ever made (yeah chess, thass right. What have you done for me lately?), but now it's less fussy, faster paced, and filled with endearing silliness. Canyon has been forced to put up with my wasting hours on the hellishly addictive thing, so much so that I'm now responding to her conversational gambits with a reflexive "Follum follum!" If you've played it, you know what that means.

Tropic Thunder

It's taken us way longer than we would have liked to see Ben Stiller's attack on Hollywood, and it was not even worth the wait. Despite the odd great moment, the whole ambitious exercise falls flat with upsetting regularity. Though Robert Downey Jr.'s performance is just as amazing as we had heard, he didn't actually seem have anything funny to say, and we ended up laughing at Jack Black's cold turkey shenanigans instead. Stiller's original concept for the film is hugely appealing, but the execution of it just didn't seem to click at all, with the plot drifting along from one lengthy and ultimately unfunny scene to another, seemingly without direction or purpose. It made Zoolander look like a tightly plotted Preston Sturges movie (I say that as a fan of Zoolander who thinks it sometimes ambles when it should be sprinting). While Adam McKay's movies mostly come alive in the editing room, this never takes shape, and no amount of amusing scenes with Tom Cruise dancing and swearing can save it. Dispiriting stuff, though I'm hoping to see a longer cut soon that might justify that brilliant idea, and maybe even give Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson something to do other than be straight men. Zoolander got funnier with each viewing, so maybe something similar will happen here, though I doubt it.


Compare that to Pineapple Express, which we watched again, and is now, definitely, my favourite comedy of the year. Considering it's a stoner comedy it's built with the same care that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg lavished on Superbad, progressing with logical beauty from scene to scene with only a couple of moments at the end of the second act that show they love their McKee a bit too much. It's not a deal breaker at all, though, and the Hot Fuzz-style genre mash-up of the final act is even more satisfying second time around, with kudos going to Rogen's repeated declarations of, "Nice!" whenever anything goes his way (such as the hilarious respawning machine guns in the underground lair).


In comparison, Tropic Thunder looks like a first cut mess, something you would show to a studio head to reassure them that the money is on the screen. How talented individuals like Stiller, Etan Cohen (partly responsible for the magnificent Idiocracy) and Justin Theroux could botch this is beyond me. The latter name is especially troubling. My previous excitement at his participation in Iron Man 2 has withered completely. Let's hope he's better off without the improvisational scenes between the leads that appear to have derailed the film so badly.

Justice Society of America by Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham

Is this the best comic on the market right now? In terms of superheroism, perhaps it is, though of course it has been great since Geoff Johns jumped onto the title early in the previous incarnation. Johns is always great value (especially lately; he's on fire), but JSA is better than ever, making me retroactively like Kingdom Come more than I originally did. However, the main reason is...





...OMG Hawkman is a TOTAL BADASS. Trust Goody-Two Shoes Jay to get in his way though.

Hunger

Turner Prize-winning director Steve McQueen's meditation on Bobby Sands' hunger strike has been damned by some of the UK press for daring to portray the Republican struggle in a noble light, which is hilariously inappropriate as that is absolutely not what the film is about at all. While, yes, it is set in The Maze and follows Sands' strike from conception to death, and while it shows in horrific detail the back-and-forth mental and physical combat between the imprisoned IRA soldiers/terrorists/politicians (delete as applicable) and the guards, it's pretty much an abstract exploration of what art is. Prisoners daub the walls of the cells with shit, flood the corridors of the prison with urine, and, eventually, stage a protest that turns their bodies, as depicted by McQueen, into a time-lapse photo of living, breathing decay. Even the poster shows one of the "paintings" by a prisoner (a nod to previous Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili?).


This is, as far as I can tell, the one reading of the movie that explains the peculiar structure. The first third of the film concerns a new prisoner (Davey, played by Brian Milligan) learning the ropes of prison life and the protests therein via his cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon), the middle third is the much-debated conversation between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and his priest (Liam Cunningham) about mortality and politics, and the final third is an impassive, minimalist depiction of Sands' lengthy death with Davey and Gerry disappearing from the movie altogether. Bear in mind, except for the middle section, there is almost no dialogue, with only a minimal amount of verbally communicated information giving background on what is happening. There is barely any character development, but then that's not what the film is about. It's about their acts, their attempts to say something with little more than their bodies as the conduit of their emotion and rage. Much of what they do has little effect. The shit paintings are blasted away and the urine is washed up in a shot of audience-patience-defying length. Only the deaths of the hunger strikers seem to have any effect, though that is relegated to a few title cards at the end of the movie giving a few nuggets of information about the subsequent years.


Getting angry about the movie for glamourising the strike (shurely shome mishtake; it's nigh-unwatchable) or having a pro-IRA agenda seems wrong-headed, though I understand many people are never going to allow themselves to move on from those horrible years during the struggle. However, in the terms of the film, that struggle is less important than McQueen's interest in the way the prisoners and hunger strikers express themselves, with the only scene that debates the details of the Republican battles and the morality of politicised suicide being the notorious static art/anti-art shot of a drab room and Sands and his priest smoking and talking for twenty minutes, which, while hypnotic and superbly played, stands in contrast with the bleak, almost silent beauty of the rest of the movie. McQueen seems to be staring into his soul and wondering why he is an artist, and how his art compares to something as drastic as turning the place you live into a hellhole using only the waste products of your body, or allowing yourself to be brutalised just to make a statement and to psychologically affect those who torture you. Isn't art meant to affect the people who experience it? Isn't making a person beat you to a bloody pulp the most extreme way to do that? Where does that leave McQueen and the rest of the YBAs?


Can you tell that I thought it was amazing? There's a lot to digest (really, no pun intended), especially as it is attracting some fascinating debate, as in this excellent piece from Frieze magazine. It's definitely on my end of year best film list, and strongly recommended for anyone who can handle the body horror.

I'm unsure as to whether admitting that I spent the last couple of weeks doing all of that in addition to habitually checking on Obama's progress makes me look more or less sad. I could lie and say I also went sailing, if that helps. Of course, now we're waiting for his press conferences as if they were episodes of Friday Night Lights, as we tuned into CNN last night to see him talk about getting a shelter dog (which made Canyon almost swoon) and expressing condolences over a journalist's damaged arm (which almost finished me off). Compared to that slavish devotion to the President-Elect, acting like a couple of lovestruck groupies, six hour marathons of CivRev almost look cool.